Up to 230,000 jobs had previously been off-limits to females

12:05 AM,
Jan. 24, 2013

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has lifted the military's ban on women serving in combat.

Written by

Tom Vanden Brook and Jim Michaels
| USA Today

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has lifted the military's ban on women serving in combat, a move that will allow women into hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando units, a senior Pentagon official said Wednesday.

Women currently serve in a number of combat positions, including piloting warplanes or serving on ships in combat areas. Since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, 292,000 women have served in those combat zones out of a total of almost 2.5 million, Pentagon records show. In both wars, 152 women have died from combat or noncombat ...